its grammar or structure would have been very different, however
different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest
had never taken place.
A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great changes may and indeed must have taken place between the first arrival of the Saxons and the days of King Alfred, when literature practically begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of the vocabulary, the body of primary “words of common life,” which, notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the “poetic and rhetorical,” as well as the “scientific” terms of Old English have died out, and a new vocabulary of “abstract and general terms” has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer “technical, commercial and scientific” vocabulary is composed of words not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized languages.
The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and which result in making modern English words very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words like stone, mine, doom, day, nail, child, bridge, shoot, Anglo-Saxon stán, mín, dóm, dæg, nægel, cild, brycg, scéot. The history of English sounds (see Phonetics) has been treated at length by Dr A. J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following. (1) In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly unchanged; thus the words at, men, bill, God, dust are pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more like the Scotch o and North English u respectively, and in most words the short a had a broader sound like the provincial a in man. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the words bán, hær, soece or séce, stól (bahn or bawn, hêr, sök or saik, stōle) are now bōne, hair, seek, stool; while the two high vowels ú (＝oo) and i (ee) have become diphthongs, as hús, scír, now house, shire, though the old sound of u remains in the north (hoose), and the original i in the pronunciation sheer, approved by Walker, “as in machine, and shire, and magazine.” (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in nă-ma, cŏ-fa, now name, cove; but to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of ĭ and ŭ. (4) Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure ĕ, and then, if final, disappeared; so oxa, séo, wudu became ox-e, se-e, wud-e, and then ox, see, wood; oxan, lufod, now oxen, loved, lov’d; settan, setton, later setten, sette, sett, now set. (5) The back consonants, c, g, sc, in connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to ch, j, sh, as circe, rycg, fisc, now church, ridge, fish. A medial or final g has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant to w or y, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in boga, laga, dæg, heg, drig, now bow, law, day, hay, dry. W and h have disappeared before r and l, as in write, (w)lisp, (h)ring; h final (＝gh) has become f, k, w or nothing, but has developed the glides u or i before itself, these combining with the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging with it into a simple vowel-sound, as ruh, hoh, boh, deah, heah, hleah, now rough, hough, bough, dough, high, laugh＝ruf, hok, bŏw, dō, hī, lâf. R after a vowel has practically disappeared in standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the vowel, as in hear, bar, more, her. These and other changes have taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws; the details as to time and mode may be studied in special works. It may be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical gender in English, and the almost complete disappearance of cases, are purely phonetic phenomena. Gender (whatever its remote origin) was practically the use of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in accordance with the genus, genre, gender or kind of nouns to which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were uniformly levelled to final ĕ, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into genders or kinds having no other existence disappeared. Thus when þæt gode hors, þone godan hund, þa godan bóc, became, by phonetic weakening, þe gode hors, þe gode hownd, þe gode boke, and later still the good horse, the good hound, the good book, the words horse, hound, book were no longer grammatically different kinds of nouns; grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of adjectives has entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated by rationality and sex, instead of grammatical gender, which has no existence in English. The man who lost his life; the bird which built its nest.
Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern
